If there has been once consistent complaint from owners of the Samsung Galaxy S8 or the Note8, it has been the dedicated Bixby button. Bixby is Samsung’s personal assistant and it was rolled out well after the Galaxy S8 was released. While Samsung did a fair amount of hyping of the AI-based assistant, it somewhat fell flat and users almost immediately began trying to figure out how to remap the dedicated button for the assistant on the phones.
Samsung squashed most of those but have finally given into customer demands. There is a new update in the Galaxy App store that should roll out to all S8 and Note8 owners that will disable the button.
Note that this will disable the button. You still can’t remap it, officially at least. Samsung won’t let you remap the button to say Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.
Once you have the new software update, you will be able to go into the Bixby settings in Settings to enable or disable the button.
The new update also brings update to the assistant in general, mainly focusing on performance updates.
The question has to be asked if this is a knock-out blow to Samsung’s assistant efforts. If users are able to disable the feature, who will actually use it going forward? With the assistant space dominated by Google, Amazon and to a lesser extent Microsoft, it is going to be hard for Samsung to gain any traction with their assistant, even with the most dedicated of Samsung users.
